Spring break mayhem can wear out students' welcome

Apr. 7, 2014
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This video image shows a crowd confronting police at a disturbance Saturday during a weekend college party in Isla Vista, Calif., that turned into a street brawl. About 100 people were arrested and at least 44 people were taken to the hospital. / KEYT-TV via AP

by Greg Toppo, USATODAY

by Greg Toppo, USATODAY

A weekend riot by alcohol-fueled college spring breakers in a California beach town may have beach communities nationwide wondering if the trouble of such disturbances is worth the boost to the local economy.

Six police officers were injured and about 100 people arrested in Isla Vista, Calif., near the campus of the University of California-Santa Barbara. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office said the annual event, named Deltopia, drew about 15,000 people.

At what point do towns - many of them tiny beach communities - say, "No more," and ask students to go elsewhere?

Perhaps no place exemplifies such a change of heart than Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where the wild spring break tradition was all but born in the 1960s. But by 1985, with the arrival of MTV and the Girls Gone Wild video franchise, city leaders and business interests decided enough was definitely enough.

College students flocked to the Atlantic Ocean beach city town after the release of the 1960 movie Where the Boys Are, starring Connie Francis and George Hamilton. But the trend actually had started quietly in the late 1940s, says Nicki Grossman, president and CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau.

At that time, northeastern colleges held their swimming and diving championships at an Olympic-size swimming pool in Fort Lauderdale, Grossman says. "As kids do, they had a great time and they told somebody else, and they told somebody else. It was all word of mouth. We never once advertised."

College students from the Midwest soon joined the Northeastern crowd, and movies then "put a real exclamation point on spring break."

The city became a popular spring break destination, but that didn't necessarily mean all that much revenue, she says. "They were 10 kids in a room and paying 39 bucks a night - not each, for the room," she says.

The party continued through the 1960s and 1970s, she says, when "It was very much the business of this community." In 1985, 380,000 spring-breakers showed up.

By then, she says,the character of spring break had changed.

"It was rowdy, it was drunk, it was sophomoric behavior, ... something icky," Grossman says. Revelers "urinated any place they could find, and the residents of the beach area were very unhappy." Local residents wanted out.

At the same time, city leaders persuaded businesses that going after more upscale beachgoers would benefit everyone, but only if they chased out the spring break crowd. Doing that, they said, would bring back families and international visitors with cash to spend.

The City Commission soon passed a law prohibiting open containers of alcohol on the beach, banned overnight parking near the beach and made the main beach thoroughfare a one-way street. Meanwhile, the state of Florida, under threat of losing federal highway funds, raised the drinking age from 18 to 21.

Thirty years later, Grossman says, the difference is breathtaking. Where a bar called the Candy Store once stood â?? it holds the dubious claim to fame of having helped popularize the wet T-shirt contest - there now sits a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The 380,000 spring breakers who romped around the city in 1985 spent about $110 million between late February and late March, the traditional spring break season. Last year, visitors during the same period spent $1.1 billion, she says.

"The businesses here did not look back. They looked back and said, 'Why didn't we do this sooner?' "

Since the 1990s, spring break revelers headed for Florida have mostly migrated to Daytona Beach and Panama City, among others.

Panama City Beach Mayor Gayle Oberst says the Gulf Coast city has been a spring break destination for 60 years, but adds, "We have seen the change in the culture" of college students who show up. Local police say as many as 300,000 students now show up each year.

The city council and local business leaders annually pitch in to pay for expanded police overtime and extra patrols by state troopers and agents from the Florida Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. But Oberst says recent publicity about bad behavior on the beach is prompting city officials to rethink spring break.

"We're trying to determine: 'Do we have too many kids to handle?'" Oberst says. "We will examine it a little bit more closely and see what we need to do."

Grossman of Fort Lauderdale says she regularly fields calls "from every one of those places asking how we managed to break out of spring break." She advises that communities figure out how to replace the revenue with an alternative. "If you're not confident you can replace one segment with another, then it is very hard to give up the candy."